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10 Surprising Behind-the-Scenes Facts About "Everything, Everything"

May 17, 2017

Warner Bros. Pictures

This post contains spoilers if you haven't read the book.

Everything, Everything, based on the YA novel by Nicola Yoon, tells the story of Maddy (Amandla Stenberg) and Olly (Nick Robinson), neighbors-turned-crushes who have one big obstacle standing in the way of their love: Maddy can't go outside. Ever. She suffers from severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), a condition that means she'll get sick if she comes in contact with pretty much anything or anyone. She's safe only inside her sanitized home, where she lives with her doctor mother (played by Anika Noni Rose). Here, director Stella Meghie shares behind-the-scenes stories from the making of the movie.

1. Amandla read for her part over Skype, while in Paris. "I said, 'Let's just read some scenes until we feel good about it,'" Stella says. "And it really was immediate. As soon as she started saying the words, I knew she was so right for [the part]." Prior to that, Stella and Amandla met for lunch, but their time was cut short by none other than Nick. "[That day] I said, ''I want to meet Nick,' and the casting director was like, 'We just got ahold of his agent, he's going to Europe for a trip tonight. Can you see him today?' So I ended up having to not hang with Amandla as long as I would have liked to. I wrote her a little note after just to let her know that it was a great time, that it was lovely to meet her."

2. There was no chemistry test between Amandla and Nick. "It was definitely a concern because the film hangs on chemistry, but we didn't have any time, because he left for Europe and then she was going on a trip through Europe, too. I joked that they should meet up and do a chemistry test in Venice or something."

3. The original script featured way more texting. "The first draft I read there was seven pages of texting and I was like, 'There's no way I'm going to shoot that.' So I ended up changing a lot of those [scenes] in my polish before we shot, adding in a bit of magical realism to the texting and putting them in the same room." Many of their text exchanges play out as conversations in Maddy's model diner, which she made for architecture class, where the only other patron is Maddy's model astronaut. "Something the producers asked [as I was pursuing the job] was, 'How are you going to not make this movie feel claustrophobic with her stuck in this house for the majority of the time?'" Stella recalls. This was one solution.

4. The actor who played the astronaut (Sage Brocklebank) caused some trouble with the crew. "He was very tall, like 6-foot-6, which my costume designer was not impressed with," Stella says. "The costume we got did not fit him. So my costume designer, Avery Plewes, said, 'Are you sure there's not another astronaut?' I'm like, 'No, he's the one. I'm sure there's tall astronauts out there. You can find a tall astronaut suit, right?' And then she did. He was just the best astronaut who auditioned; he was a very deadpan astronaut, which is what I was looking for."

5. The Hawaii scenes, when Maddy runs away with Olly, were shot in Mexico, near Punta Cana. "It was definitely our most fun week shooting. I was swimming in between takes, doing our notes between scenes wading in the water." For Amandla, though, that week was a bit more difficult. "We shot some of the more challenging scenes, physically, for Amandla that week," Stella says. There's one scene where her head sinks beneath the water, out of the shot, and then pops back up above the surface. "When we were shooting that, there was a man underneath the water, a diver, holding her foot to keep her under, because she had to go really far under the surface," Stella says. "And then we'd say 'action' and he would release her. I was kind of terrified for her, but she was such a good sport about it. Later she was like, 'It was terrifying.'"

6. They had to halt production due to an intense storm. "One day there was a lot of lightning, and we were trying to shoot these underwater scenes with the fish swimming all around them. And our underwater DP was said, 'It's fine, it's fine.' And I was like, 'Well, he does this for a living. If he's not scared why should we be scared?' Me and Amandla and Nick were like, 'Yeah, we can do this!' But the producers said, 'Umm, no. Let's wrap this up.' We were on these big boats, traveling back to Punta Cana, and it was a storm. I felt like I was in Wolf of Wall Street. We were like, 'We're gonna die.' Me and my costume designer were just sitting on the floor of the boat just wondering if we'd make it. It was a long 45 minutes, for sure."

7. Nicola Yoon makes a cameo in the movie, with her husband and daughter. "She has a cameo in the Hawaii scene, when the drone shot comes over the trees and picks up Nick and Amandla running into the ocean. Nicola and her husband and daughter are playing in the ocean and Nick and Amandla run past them. They were playing in the water for an hour — in the same movement — as we tried to get the shot. Nicola was like, 'This is the longest 3-second cameo ever.' And I warned her! 'I told you to take the cameo in the bookstore scene, you didn't listen to me.'"

8. There was no pink allowed on set. "I just feel like sometimes when you're doing teen girl movies, it becomes something that people put in every corner of every frame, something pink. And I love pink. I was obsessed with Petra Collins photos, and the pink that she kind of splashes through all her pictures is so beautiful. But I wanted this to feel not like the average world, I wanted it to look a little different than you might imagine a movie like this. So [we used] four colors: pastel blue, green, yellow, and purple. I think my costume designer and production designer were going to shoot me, because I was saying, 'That's not the right color purple,' 'That's not pastel.'"

9. There were ongoing conversations about how to handle the twist ending. "It definitely was like, 'We have to stick the landing, or the whole thing would fall apart,'" Stella says. "That was one of the reasons I begged Anika Noni Rose to [play Maddy's mom], because I would imagine that last scene where you find out [Maddy wasn't really sick], and I would be so terrified that it was going to come across false." The term "Munchausen by proxy" — a syndrome where a caregiver makes up an illness in the person for whom she's caring — did come up in conversations (although it doesn't appear in the book), but Stella didn't want to incorporate that into the ending or focus too much on Maddy's mother at all. "I think an attempt to wrap up her storyline with her mom would have felt extremely false. Rather than [try to answer] 'Did she get arrested? Did she go to the doctor?' we just focused it on Maddy's situation and her health and what she was going to do with her life moving forward."

10. Beyoncé came to the L.A. premiere. Stella didn't get to meet her, so she still doesn't really believe it happened, but she says the queen said hello to Amandla. "I only have the stories from Warner Brothers marketing to believe that she was there," she says. "She's like a spirit."

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